[dmitriid]

I lived through it in Moldova (see my other comment as well, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27081059). In 1989 that is literally what happened, the whole country went from Cyrillic script to Latin script.

I took slightly over year IIRC for basically everything written in Romanian to go from Cyrillic script to Latin script. And it was very, very hard on many people, especially middle age and older. As various government jobs switched to Latin script, quite a few people where let go because they couldn't adapt to the new system quickly enough.

I was in school at the time, and I remember that even for us it took some adjustment. I think it took me at least several months to fully switch (I'm not a native speaker, and we Romanian was a mandatory class from second grade up).

A friend of my mother's, a native Moldovan with roots back to time immemorial, still struggles with Latin script even though it's been 30 years since the change.